Do-it-yourselfers inspire hardware renaissance in Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO May 6 (Reuters) - In the shadow of Internet
monoliths such as Facebook, Google and Twitter
, it's easy to forget that Silicon Valley got its start
from hard-scrabble tinkerers building radios, microchips and
other devices.

Now, a proliferation of high-tech but affordable
manufacturing tools and new sources of funding are empowering a
generation of handy entrepreneurs and laying the foundation for
a hardware renaissance.

Google in January acquired four-year-old smart thermostat
maker Nest Labs for $3.2 billion. Facebook in March spent
$2 billion on virtual reality startup Oculus Rift, founded by a
college dropout in his parents' garage. 3D printer maker
MakerBot Industries was sold for $400 million in 2013 to
Stratasys Inc - just three years after it was cofounded by a
former art teacher.

All of them embody the growing focus on hardware and the
so-called "Maker movement" sweeping northern California and, in
a smaller way, Europe and other countries. Renewed interest in
tinkering with objects - versus apps or software - is attracting
more money from investors and fostering a growing number of
workshops, where aspiring inventors can get their hands on
computerized milling machines and other high-end tools.

"Two and a half years ago when we were started, it was
rough," said Jeremy Conrad, co-founder of Lemnos Labs, an
incubator that provides funding, tools and guidance for startups
working on physical products. "Now we have more relationships
with venture capitalists who are interested in hardware than we
have companies to fund."

The growing wave of do-it-yourselfers may hold the key to
manufacturing innovation. President Barack Obama sees children
who are "makers of things, not just consumers of things" as a
step toward rebuilding a withered U.S. manufacturing industry.

A decade ago, free, open-source code slashed the cost and
complexity of starting a software company, sparking a boom in
Internet and social media startups founded by twenty-something,
self-taught programmers. Now hardware is catching up to the
open-source revolution, with common standards and a culture that
encourages the sharing of designs and building blocks that save
inventors the time and expense of reinventing the wheel.

Take the palm-sized "Arduino" computer board, ubiquitous in
the maker movement. The roughly $20 item was developed for
students, offering low price and relatively easy programming.
Arduino lets do-it-yourselfers snap together and program
interchangeable components such as GPS chips and motor
controllers to run everything from robots to cocktail mixers.

KNITTING TO ROBOTICS

From families to entrepreneurs, growing numbers of people
are rolling up their sleeves and discovering how much easier it
has become to make things with their hands.

The advent of community workshops, often called
hackerspaces, allow like-minded people to collaborate on
everything from knitting to drones and often provide industrial
tools - including laser-cutters and 3D printers - too expensive
for most people to buy on their own.

TechShop, one of the largest in its field, charges members a
monthly fee for classes and access to tools, and has grown to
nine locations around the country and 6,000 members since its
first outlet opened in 2006.

While hackerspaces have existed for years in Europe and are
expanding in Asia, northern California's technology legacy has
made it a maker Mecca.

Today's do-it-yourselfers follow a storied tradition in the
San Francisco Bay area, where amateurs dabbled with early radios
a century ago and electronics enthusiasts in the 1970s formed
the Homebrew Computer Club, a group whose members included Apple
Inc co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Maker festivals have become major venues for hobbyists to
show off their projects and hob-nob. In 2006, 22,000 people
descended on magazine publisher Maker Media's first "Maker
Faire" in Silicon Valley, a cross between a science fair and
jamboree for adults. Since then, its events have expanded across
the United States and into Japan and Europe with a total of
530,000 attendees at affiliated fairs last year. The flagship
annual shindig in San Mateo, California, is on May 17 and 18.

Most makers are hobbyists, but a handful sell their wares to
friends or online and an even smaller group aspires to win
backing from investors, or from crowdfunding sites such as
Kickstarter or Indiegogo, to manufacture their products.

Take theater technician Andrew Rutter, who took
laser-cutting classes through the maker community in San
Francisco soon after immigrating from Britain in 2010.

He used his new skill to build a high-end 3D printer and
soon after launched Type A Machines, which has grown to 21
employees and sold over 500 of the devices, assembling many of
them at a former Caterpillar factory.

"There is a large percentage of people out there who have
ideas and want to make stuff, but they lack the training and
access to equipment to do it," the 33-year old said.

Ann Miura-Ko, a self-professed tinkerer and partner at
Floodgate, which invests in early-stage startups, believes
nostalgia for the Valley days of old plays a role in the Maker
boom.

"Just the same way you have kids who have been coding for 10
years at the age of 16, you're going to see kids who have been
making stuff for 10 years at the age of 16. If you see that,
you'll know we're ready for the Mark Zuckerberg of hardware."
Miura-Ko said.

It may take years for hardware to excite investors the way
it once did. Dealing with suppliers, assembly lines, transport,
warehousing and retailers still make the hardware business
daunting compared with software for many would-be entrepreneurs
in Silicon Valley.

But interest is rising. According to the National Venture
Capital Association, investments in various categories of
computer- and electronics-related startups grew 24 percent last
year to $843 million after falling 26 percent in 2012. The group
does not track a specific "hardware" category.

Kickstarter is another popular venue for makers seeking
funding. Since the crowdsourcing platform's 2009 launch, more
than $116 million has been raised for more than 1,400
technology-related projects, of which the majority have been
hardware gadgets. The Pebble smartwatch, which raised over $10
million, and Oculus Rift were major Kickstarter successes.

Semiconductor companies including Atmel, ARM
Holdings and Intel Corp now sponsor maker
events and workshops, hoping perhaps to happen upon the next
Steve Jobs.

Even the White House is planning its own maker-meetup this
year. It wants public schools to create more hackerspaces, and
for universities to let students submit maker projects as part
of their applications, like the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology started doing last year.

Products of the do-it-yourself movement - better 3D
printing, laser cutters, water jets and other tools - will help
the United States safeguard and extend its lead in advanced
manufacturing, said Christine Furstoss, who is in charge of
manufacturing R&D at General Electric.

"We're proud of our manufacturing heritage, but we don't
invent everything," Furstoss said of GE, which has opened some
of its patent catalog, including technology for cooling jets and
computerized scooters, to inventors. "The spirit and tools of
the maker movement are something we want to engage with."
(Reporting by Noel Randewich, additional reporting by Sarah
McBride; Editing by Ken Wills)